40 square blocks were destroyed, thousands dead.
We have heard "36 square blocks were destroyed" said a thousand times. That was NORTH TULSA, 1921. The statement on the 40 square blocks was Ukraine, 2022.
It peeked my attention because for 100 years we've been guessing how many North Tulsans died when a mass mob shot, burned, looted and bombed a population of 11,000, with about 6,000 accounted for after the embers were out. 5,000 is an awful lot of people to never receive a letter from, never hear thousands of their children, tens of thousands of their grandchildren and great grandchildren talk about...there is one book, published in the 1990s, written about the massacre by a survivor. One.
But, miraculously, there are survivors from those two days in American history whose eyewitness accounts still have some chance of helping us do what did not happen in 1921...and what is not happening in 2022.
Stand up for what is right.
JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD, a local organization, is giving us all an opportunity to do just that everyday this week.
According to JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD, next Monday, on May 2, "members of the Greenwood descendant community" will be joined by "Tulsans in demanding justice for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and its continuous harm" at the Tulsa County Courthouse at 1p.
The organization sent out this message: We are just days away from Monday, May 2—the date of the historic motion to dismiss hearing where Tulsa County Judge Caroline Wall will hear our plea to allow the pursuit for justice for the Tulsa Race Massacre to continue.
The urgency...the court is set to either allow the case for justice for 1921 to proceed or dismiss the case, altogether.
We may never know the number of people who died from north or south of Main Street in May and June of 1921, but, there is no mystery about who took on the job of rebuilding the Greenwood section of NORTH TULSA. The population that had grown from 6,000 to nearly 80,000 by the year 2000 built and rebuilt Greenwood/aka BLACK WALL STREET and NORTH TULSA many times over.
Our great-grandparents, our grandparents, parents, teachers, pastors, friends, neighbors kept life together in NORTH TULSA, flourishing for nearly a century. Over a century ago, the handful of Black pioneer families who founded First Baptist North Tulsa in the 1890s were joined by thousands of other families who would, over time, design and build thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses and churches, and dozens of schools and social institutions, today, stretching thousands of acres beyond Greenwood.
A dismissal verdict will be a heavy blow toward turning all that work into dust.
The hard pill to swallow is knowing most of that work took place during decades when North Tulsans had zero official political representation or power or status in the city of Tulsa or the state of Oklahoma. On the contrary, but for Tulsa County and the US federal government, schools and civil rights in NORTH TULSA would have, long ago, met the same fate its Greenwood district met in 1921.
But, they didn't.
NORTH TULSA, still, as my dad always said, is "The greatest place on Earth."
R. Clardy/NTm
4/25/2022
At right, the schedule of events for a week focused on JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD>
Visit the JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD FOUNDATION site to sign a petition and find other ways of supporting the 1921 Race Massacre Survivors and the future of Greenwood
Learn more about the historic lawsuit" demanding accountability and restitution for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and 100 years of continued harm."
YOU VOTED...
1/7
District 1 Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper
918.596.1921
District 2 Councilor Jeannie Cue
918.596.1922
District 3 Councilor Christa Patrick
918.596.1923
District 4 Councilor Kara Joy Mckee
918.596.1924
District 5 Councilor Mikey Arthrell-Knezek
918.596.1925
District 6 Councilor Connie Dotson
918.596.1926
District 7 Councilor Lori Dector Wright
918.596.1927
District 8 Councilor Phil Lakin
918.596.1928
District 9 Councilor Jayme Fowler
918.596.1929
US Sen Inhofe: 202-224-4721
US Sen Lankford: 202-224-5754
US Rep Hern: 918-935-3222
OK Governor Stitt: 405-521-2342
OK Sen Matthews: 405-521-5598
OK Rep Goodwin: 405-557-7406
OK Rep Nichols: 405-557-7391
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It was an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in North Tulsa...and then it wasn't. At the corner of Apache and MLK, director DENNIS DELEMAR swooped in from LA with a film crew completing the work they'd debut in 2021 at the first Annual Greenwood Film Festival. The 2nd Annual Greenwood Film Festival starts in June.
DENNIS DELEMAR is a South Carolina-born filmmaker, serious filmmaker, who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma years ago to begin working on a film about a hidden history that fascinated him. Delemar was gripped, he was fully enveloped by the lingering spirit of Black entrepreneurship and cooperation that even a massacre could not destroy. He realized the commercial value of BLACK WALL STREET branding before anyone else. He printed T-shirts, created a BLACK WALL STREET fashion line. Dennis Delemar and his ZAYAN STUDIO had become the new BLACK WALL STREET.
Fast-forward to 2021 and ZAYAN STUDIOS returned ready to premier BLACK WALL STREET An American Nightmare at their anxiously awaited first annual GREENWOOD FILM FESTIVAL in July, 2021 in NORTH TULSA at the Greenwood Cultural Center. Filmed in Tulsa, festival goers, particularly, recognized a KKK scene filmed at the corner of MLK and Apache that brought out hundreds of citizens who were convinced the actors were an actual threat.
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